Howard Ward, chief investment officer of growth equities at Gamco Investors discusses Apple’s preparation of a smaller, cheaper iPhone and how they can use that to appeal to emerging markets.

Ward said, “Apple’s reached a point where they can’t ignore the largest segment of the market, which is the emerging markets, where you have billions of people. If they can lock them into the Apple family, invite them in, get them to use Apple products, get them to buy additional products on top of the phone, and then, as their incomes rise, a higher-priced phone.”

It almost seems as though Wall Street is trying to box Apple into a corner and I don’t understand why. This constant talk of how Apple must compete with the low-priced segment of the market or lose everything makes little sense to me when Apple is still making plenty of money. I don’t see how building lower-quality products benefits Wall Street at all. I realize that Apple should try to make affordable products for China due to a huge market to be filled, but that’s as far as it goes. However, Wall Street must have some agenda I’m not aware of to be so adamant about grabbing market share alone.

As a shareholder, I certainly don’t want the company’s share price to keep falling, but I also don’t like the idea of Apple racing to the bottom selling cheap hardware. That’s why I wish Apple would branch out into another line of revenue that doesn’t involve hardware. Move into cloud services or even financial lending which seems like it could be a lucrative business for Apple. Amazon and Google can do cloud services, so why not Apple. It seems selling hardware won’t move Apple’s share price up, anymore.

This punishing of Apple because of not having major market share just doesn’t make any sense. Apple will have a huge a quarter as ever, yet everyday I look, the share price is down while Amazon and Google’s is up. Apple just can’t be doing that badly to keep falling like it is.